Pretend We're Dead
by S4ltv1n3g4r
Summary: Remus is back from recon with Greyback's werewolves. Tonks has been waiting up for him at Grimmauld place all night. Lemons on the couch? Lemons on the couch. I need some serious psychiatric help.


**Disclaimer: I wish.**

Remus Lupin is the reason I've started keeping a calendar and using it. Not anywhere anyone can see, mind you-usually, I just keep it tucked into my bag. Before the Order, before the Second War, before I knew about blood politics or Voldemort or we're-all-going-to-die-tomorrow or Remus, I could wake up and not know if it was Wednesday or Thursday. I could not know if it was today or tomorrow.

Now I watch the lunar cycles until I feel like I'm made of clockwork.

The day after the full moon is when Remus usually sneaks back from spy work. Fenrir Greyback and the others are too busy gloating over their recent kills, getting wasted, and fucking to notice he's gone. It's not for the Order's sake at all. He and Dumbledore have ways of communicating remotely.

No, it's because for more grueling hours than I care to recount, I've been waiting for him in the living room of Grimmauld Place.

I wish he didn't have to go, but he's the only one of us cut out for this sort of recon.

If it wouldn't be such a torment for him, I would wish the full moon came more frequently.

As the door opens, a scream of _Half breeds! Plague on my fathers' house!_ pierces the air, but it sounds underwater.

I'm inert on the couch.

"Muffling charm?" Remus says in approval, and I'm still inert on the couch. I give the slightest stir.

I am a machine. I need more oil.

"I've missed you, Nymphadora."

He's sidled up next to me on the couch now, and I hate my first name but I still can't muster up a proper response.

That's what you are in wartime-a machine. It's a necessary measure. Pull a lever. Push a button. Kill someone before you get killed.

I fumble in the dark until I find his hand and squeeze it. Then his lips are on mine.

Between kisses, I say, "I was so worried."

I say, "I puked twice today, I was so worried."

He responds with another kiss and some sentimental revelation, something like, "You know, when the Wolfsbane fails, thinking of you keeps me so sane, it's crazy."

The best nights are when I'm too exhausted to have a go at him for being so reckless as to take this mission when he knows his absence is like torture for me. I am incapable of anger. I am incapable of thinking of my own emotional needs, robotic and stoic as the sleepless hours have made me. There's only his body on top of mine, and my hands slip under his shirt so I can rake his skin with my nails as he works my lips apart. He flinches under my touch, like I've prodded a fresh bruise or grazed a freshly opened cut. Then, all I can think about is loving him better, and my touch lightens soothingly and I don't exist, and right now nonexistence feels about as good as an orgasm.

The best nights are when we haven't seen each other in forever, and he's too desperate for his fix of me to worry about hurting or outcasting me. When he's spent the wolf and it can't come between us. He allows himself his fill of me, and I feel his hands under my bra, his mouth on my tits, the hardening shaft of his cock pressing into my belly, and I'm still so exhausted and everything's so ethereal and disconnected…

He probably thinks I've fallen asleep. I could be dead for all he knows, but he keeps going, and if he doesn't take off my panties soon I'm going to need new ones.

The two burning questions when you start understanding how life goes are, _when and how will I lose my virginity_ and _when and how will I die?_

The way couples always try to climax together, as Remus eases off my pants and slides into me, I dream of a day we'll die together, too.

It's war, and we could be dead tomorrow. How kids play house to make raising a family less of a strange, scary thing, I figure maybe dead-tomorrow isn't such a scary concept if we pretend we're dead now.

**A/N: Oh god, I just felt like I needed to get this pseudo-necrophilia craving out of my system before bad things happen. So here. It's two thirty in the morning. **

**THANK YOU GOOD NIGHT COMMENTS APPRECIATED HAVE A NICE LIFE.**


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